WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

On This Day in HISTORY

1479 BCE – Thutmose III ascends to the throne of Egypt, although power effectively shifts to Hatshepsut (‘Foremost of Noble Ladies’ – second confirmed female pharaoh, after Sobekneferu – Low Chronology of the 18th dynasty)

1184 BCE – Traditional date of the fall of Troy

1558 – Mary, Queen of Scots, marries the French Dauphin, François, in Paris

1704 – The first regular newspaper in British Colonial America, The Boston News-Letter, begins publication

1706 – Giambattista Martini born, Italian composer

1800 – Library of Congress Day * – The U.S. Library of Congress is established when President John Adams signs legislation to appropriate $5,000 to purchase “such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress”

1815 –Anthony Trollope born, English novelist

1847 – Susan Dimock born, American physician, resident physician of New England Hospital for Women and Children, first woman to join North Carolina Medical Society

1885 – American sharpshooter Annie Oakley is hired by Nate Salsbury to be a part of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show

1889 – Lyubov Popova born, Russian avant-garde artist and designer; one of the first women in Cubo-Futurism

1895 – Joshua Slocum, begins his voyage to become the first person to sail single-handedly around the world, setting sail from Boston MA aboard his sloop Spray

1898 – Spain declares war after rejecting an American ultimatum to withdraw from Cuba

1904 – Willem de Kooning born in Holland, American Abstract Expressionist painter

1905 – Robert Penn Warren born, American writer and first U.S. poet laureate

1913 – The Woolworth Building, a skyscraper in New York City, still of the 100 tallest buildings in the U.S.

1915 – Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day * – 250 Armenian intellectuals and leaders are arrested in Constantinople, beginning the Armenian Genocide in Turkey; an estimated 1.5 million Armenians are killed; the Turkish government remains adamant that the numbers are greatly exaggerated and most of the deaths caused by disease, but there is convincing evidence, including photographs and written eye-witness accounts by workers for international charities and by missionaries running schools and orphanages in Turkey

1916 – Easter Rising: Irish rebels, led by Patrick Pearse and James Connolly, launch a vain attempt in Dublin to end British rule and proclaim an Irish Republic

1916 – Ernest Shackleton and five men of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition launch a lifeboat from uninhabited Elephant Island in the Southern Ocean to rescue the crew of the sunken Endurance

1922 – The first segment of the Imperial Wireless Chain to provide wireless telegraphy between Leafield in Oxfordshire UK and Cairo, Egypt, goes into operation

1923 – In Vienna, Sigmund Freud publishes his paper Das Ich und das Es (The Ego and the Id) outlining his theories of the id, ego, and super-ego

1926 – The Treaty of Berlin is signed by Germany and the Soviet Union, pledging neutrality in the event of an attack on the other by a third party for the next five years

1931 –Bridget Riley born, English artist and muralist, she is one of the foremost painters in Op Art

1932 – Benny Rothman leads the Mass Trespass of Kinder Scout, in the Peak district of Derbyshire, to protest walkers in England and Wales being denied access to areas of open country; six trespassers are arrested. Trespass is not a criminal offence in any part of Britain at the time, but jail sentences of two to six months are given for offences of violence in scuffles with the gamekeepers attempting to keep the walkers out. The movement contributed to passage of the National Parks legislation in 1949

1962 –Massachusetts Institute of Technology makes 1st satellite relay of a television signal

1968 – Apple Records refuses to sign David Bowie

1968 – Louis Armstrong’s single “What a Wonderful World” reaches #1 on the UK’s charts, making him the oldest person, at 66, ever to score a UK #1

1970 – The Gambia becomes a republic within the Commonwealth of Nations, with Dawda Jawara as its first President

1972 – John Lennon’s controversial single “Woman is the Nigger of the World” is released in the U.S, reaching #57 on Billboard’s Hot 100, in spite of virtually every U.S. radio station refusing to air it. Yoko Ono had used the phrase, and Lennon wrote the song to make the point that women deserve better treatment and higher status

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About wordcloud9

Nona Blyth Cloud has lived and worked in the Los Angeles area for the past 45 years, spending much of that time commuting on the 405 Freeway. After Hollywood failed to appreciate her genius for acting and directing, she began a second career managing non-profits, from which she has retired.
Nona has now resumed writing whatever comes into her head, instead of reports and pleas for funding. She lives in a small house overrun by books with her wonderful husband and a bewildered Border Collie.

3 Responses to ON THIS DAY: April 24, 2018

In the late 80s and early 90s I suffered from an illness I diagnosed, identified and named myself: “Library of Congress Disease,” which I shortened (as is common in medicine) to “LCD.” The sole symptom was sudden onset of unconsciousness which occasionally gave rise to deep crease marks on my face if the unconsciousness began when an open book was inconveniently placed on the table before me when I lapsed. The etiology was injustice. I would go to the library when it opened, go to the Law Reading Room, greet the librarians and take my seat, then go fetch the volumes I would be reading and taking notes from. An hour or two later, having shelved and fetched 5 or 10 other heavy volumes, I would happen to read a case (say, the habeas corpus case of Sami versus Israel, or the like) and then it would strike. I would recover from LCD when the librarians dimmed the lights 15 minutes before closing. Then, I would rub my face, close up the books, shelve them and wrap up my notebooks, load up my backpack and quietly leave.
I actually spoke to a doctor about this once. He said, “That’s a dissociative disorder.” But it never happened anywhere BUT Library of Congress. I haven’t gone there recently.